Cimorene

I feel fandom in general is really missing out on the potential hilarity of a Unitarian Universalist congregation AU. Not surprisingly, of course, because most people don't know what that's like, but every time I ponder the funny potential of the university AU, I inevitably think about the similar, but often weirder, potential of the UU AU.

Of course this is a broad range of possibility, but in fandom-specific terms, a group of teenagers somewhat reluctantly ending up all employed in child-wrangling, like in Stranger Things, actually happened to me when I was a teenager. I'm pretty sure that all the members of our congregation's "Teen Group" were employed in childcare during the services at one point, because we all wanted the money and there's always a shortage of UU adults who are willing to miss the service.

(At the time I found this tough to understand, because the 'services' are basically lectures on various political and historical topics, and our minister trainee was a pretentious, twee dipshit without much charisma or skill at public speaking. In retrospect, though, I realize they were looking forward to the coffee and conversation hour and the chance to talk freely with adults who shared their values, since the congregation was a progressive enclave full of non-southerners, pagans, atheists, queers, Christian refugees, and social justice warriors who were mostly in the toxic white supremacist Christian nationalist deep south due to the university.)

There were all kinds of enemies for us UU kids and teens, both within the congregation and without. Having to choose lying about religion, refusing to discuss it, or endless debates (sometimes bullying) from fundamentalist classmates was common experience to all the kids in the congregation. There was even a super fucked-up witch hunt in my childhood in which the congregation's most popular volunteer religious education teacher and head of the social justice committee, my mom's close friend, was driven out of the congregation permanently by a brigade of officious ladies who had all previously been on my personal shitlist for being what I then referred to as "fake nice" (I think I was about 10-11 at the time). His original offense was using the word "stupid" when rough-housing with a horde of kids, unknowingly hurting one's feelings, but his alleged crime was that holding a gradeschool kid upside down by their feet while they giggle was evidence of not knowing how gentle you have to be with children. His real crime was being a childless man and good with children, because it was their heavy implications on this subject that did most of the work. (They all stayed and experienced zero consequences, two of the leaders giving public non-apology apologies to the congregation and not to their victim, may they all suffer from ingrown toenails and chronic headaches. They also continued to be obnoxious to any kid they ever interacted with basically.)

There's plenty of meat for fandoms that don't focus on teenagers, though. There was a spiritual? Discussion? group that I'm pretty sure had a controversy and split in two over the question of whether they would use the term "praying" or not for moments of silence, with a big debate over whether it's still praying if what you're really talking to is the (possibly divine) little voice within. There were mighty battles over committees, with at least two people who apparently lived just to join them and make sure nothing ever got done at the meetings. There were desperate efforts to get someone to agree to be the president of the board every year, because moderating the main board meeting means it's their job to get people to get to the point using only Robert's Rules of Order and if they fail nobody gets to go home and everybody else gets to blame them for their sleep deprivation. There was a desperate search for a permanent minister to hire that lasted over a decade. There was a feud between the committee chair of the hospitality committee and the paid events coordinator that resulted in the yearly fundraising dinner almost not happening. There was a years-long battle fought by my parents and the other half-jewish couple to get them to stop calling the Thanksgiving event a "Thanksgiving Seder" and instead provide accurate information about other cultures' harvest and Thanksgiving holidays, with many, many offensive statements from extremely culturally Christian white people who thought there was no reason for jews to be offended. (We did win!) And there was a huge kerfuffle when the trainee minister tried to ban our ex minister, who had been a member for decades and had many close friendships in the congregation, not only from attending, but from having social interactions with anyone. About half the congregation were ready to quit over it.

I've been reading Stranger Things fanfiction the past few weeks, as previously mentioned. Season 4 is set in spring 1986, when I was four years old and temporarily in Toronto (between New Orleans, where I was born, and a few months in the Kansas City area with my maternal clan while my dad was jobhunting).

So of course, I remember the 1980s, although not quite as well as someone who was 11-20 like the main cast of Stranger Things are at the time. (waxjism was 10 in 1986, but she's also Finnish). Most of my memories up until about 1989 are a bit vaguer and spottier, but the era was still the recent past (and the setting of a huge quantity of children's and YA books and movies I read as a preteen) in the more vivid part of my childhood. Just... that's the nostalgia context for this post, I guess. (And I know the likelihood that anybody reading my journal DOESN'T remember the 1980s is slim, but... you know.)

Because most of the people writing Stranger Things fanfiction right now are absolutely tiny BABIES, obviously, in comparison, and it's really easy to tell because the fashion in fandoms right now is mostly to not use a beta and to loudly talk about that and about everything else in their authors' notes, bless their hearts*.

This fandom actually isn't as bad as I might have expected at first, though, based on the egregious violations of google/wiki-availability, logic, and cultural literacy to be found in most historical fandoms when research and betas aren't involved (and I mean even mid-20th century historical fandoms here too, not just the Victorian and Age of Sail stuff). Perhaps it's because it's just one generation away - and because of the current popular wave of 80s nostalgia and pop culture artifacts?

• Phones. Corded phones and period-appropriate cordlesses seem to be pretty well covered! There's lots of adorable lingering on physical description of the phones, as they're obviously exotic to the writer the way they wouldn't be to the character, like 'placing the beige plastic phone back on the wall' style stuff. However, there's also lots of calling people on these corded phones in the middle of the night, and that's not something teengers could get away with. Only rich kids (Steve, and Max in season 3 and earlier) have their own phone extensions in their rooms - that is, a separate phone number just for them. Otherwise, when the phone rang, every phone in your house would ring, so if you called your friend in the middle of the night you'd wake up their parents. (Unless their parents are absent or at work, which applies to Steve and Eddie generally, but not to the other kids.)



• Answering machines! Answering machines seem pretty unknown to this fandom. I haven't seen a single appearance of an answering machine. I have seen voicemail, which was a business-only phenomenon at the time. Guaranteed, absolutely, none of the families in Stranger Things have voicemail at their houses. They kind of fulfill the same purpose, but the answering machine has a miniature cassette tape in it and you can play back the messages, rewind, and then eventually overwrite them of course.



• Not everybody had VCRs in 1986, but it's probably fair enough to assume all the families in Stranger Things do.



• Almost nobody had CDs in 1986. I've seen them make a few probably-accidental dubious appearances. Rich people DID have them, though, so Steve's parents having a big stereo that plays them is perfectly correct. We didn't get our first CD player until 1993, and most of my bourgeois-er friends had them a couple years before.



• Jeans! There's so much wrong about jeans. First of all, "skinny jeans" is modern jeans jargon. Jeans in the 80s weren't "skinny", they were just tight. Furthermore, tight jeans in the 1980s were nothing like modern skinny jeans, because stretch jeans didn't exist. The first stretch jeans spreading through jeans-stores in the mall were in the late 90s (and they initially had a lot less spandex than now - more like 1%). Jeans were 100% cotton in the 1980s. Pure cotton jeans will stretch, but they stretch with wear (heat, moisture, and pressure). People did all kinds of tricks to get into tight jeans - when my mom was in high school in the 1970s, all the girls would lie on the floor after gym class to suck their stomachs in enough to button the high-waisted jeans. Wax tells me that in the 80s punks and scene people would put jeans on in a bathtub full of water in order to let the water stretch them out and then let them dry on their legs (this sounds extreme and I'd never heard of it though). And the end result of that didn't look like modern "skinny jeans", because the fabric just... wasn't stretchy. There was more give. There were more wrinkles. And it was more likely to tear or split. Also, if you look at Stranger Things, nobody has tight jeans: Eddie's jeans are ordinary Levi's, probably 501s, just like Steve's, and they're not tight. Which is pretty standard. Tight jeans were not a requirement or even all that common for metalheads in the 80s. Also I have to assume the access to scene styles is a little lower out in rural Indiana than it might be in a big city.



• Safe sex: Safe sex has been pretty popular in fanfiction - that is, conversations about consent and condom and lube use and prep have all been pretty common - for more than a decade. A lot of this probably resulted from a sort of cultural reaction to the unrealistic portrayals of gay sex in early slash, which provoked a lot of discourse and some heated battles. But part of it also resulted from a general higher awareness of safe sex, culturally. Condoms existed hundreds of years ago, yeah, and there was some historical awareness of the sexual spread of some diseases, but the idea of "safe sex" - the discourse of "safe sex" - is pretty much a post-AIDS-epidemic phenomenon. Not entirely: there was also a huge fight for birth control and pregnancy prevention awareness, and that played a huge role!
  
  But basically, the reason the AIDS epidemic was such a big epidemic, and so deadly, was that all the sex people were having WASN'T safe. At the beginning of the epidemic, it wasn't known how it was spreading. As it continued to spread, the idea of a gay disease (religious undertones) got a lot of cultural weight, but the government continued to do nothing, and that includes nothing about public health or sex education. As gay men started increasingly using condoms to protect themselves, the education was spreading within the community. People who had sex with men AND women spread HIV outside the gay community because safe sex wasn't particularly popular in either situation. The idea of an "STD panel" of multiple tests all at once came later - the encouragement for everyone (and not just gay guys) to get these tests came later too. All this is to say that I appreciate that there's typically a higher than average rate of condom usage in this fandom, mostly without discussing AIDS, because that would understandably open up an unwelcome can of worms. I can buy this, although it should be noted that Steve having a concept of condoms as anything other than birth control is vanishingly unlikely. Eddie is often written as having contact with some form of gay community in this fanon, which is like... I don't think super likely actually, but it's possible, he has a car, there are cities... I can buy it.
  
  And all this is to say that the multi-fandom popularity of a conversation about safe sex where two people agree to forego condoms for romantic reasons because they both know that they're "clean"? Nope. No way. They don't know. They have no way to know that. They might assume it if they're both virgins, but otherwise... no. You would only know this if you had been specifically exposed to the risk of HIV and been tested as a result. That's not impossible for someone in an urban gay subculture, but... for a poor teenager in a rural area? HOW? There are no clinics. There are doctors' offices. You have to have health insurance, or you have to pay out of pocket; you have to call for an appointment.

 



*I'm not actually southern, so "bless their hearts" is not part of my native dialect. My dialect doesn't have an expression that fits the circumstances this perfectly, though.

I've been thinking about this as a central trope and kinda wanting to write something with that, though I don't have any characters in mind.

But it occurred to me belatedly that I can't think of that many examples of what I'm talking about:

• Batman and Ra's al Ghul, at least in Batman Begins


• Dumbledore in HP, kind of, but this is arguable because it doesn't seem fully intended (understood?) by the text/author


• Dooku (in Star Wars) doesn't really work because all the mentoring happened off screen and he wasn't significant to the heroes before his introduction as villain. Besides, it's Qui-Gon who was his protege, and he's already dead.


• The wizard in The Riddle-Master of Hed books has the right vibe, but maybe he's not present and interacting with the plot enough prior to the revelation.

Now I'm thinking any this I'm pretty sure I've tried asking for other examples before. But no matter how I cudgel my brains, I can't seem to turn up any in my knowledge of media fandom and media sff. And that seems weird!

It's pretty hot, like, there was a high yesterday (outside) of 31° C (I think that's 87? I looked it up. So like, not actually that hot for an outside IF you have air conditioning everywhere, but Finland doesn't and we don't).

It's better inside though, because our house was very well designed (by the official government people in Finland in the 1940s) to create natural air circulation and warmth and coolth and all that and also has well-placed windows for the purpose. It reached about 27 by the thermometer in our livingroom yesterday, which is where we and the bunnies hung out. (The cats seek out whichever room is most like a sauna much of the time.) But it was cooler because this side (the northwest side) of the house is also well-shaded - these windows don't have any direct sun all day at this time of year, and we installed our window screens all around and have a fan circulating the air.

Wax has also watched the new series of Stranger Things, which is a show I mostly don't watch but wander in every now and then and ask the odd question, so I recognize people and have impressions, but I couldn't pass a quiz about the plot. However, I followed a random link from Tumblr the other day to someone's fanfic about Eddie, the long-haired metalhead dungeon master character from the new season, which is - okay, in the show, Eddie wears a black bandana in his back pocket, but like, the people mentioning the bandana code were joking, obviously. I think. Because it's a CODE, the bandana code only works when there are other gay kinksters to cruise with. If you were wearing it as part of your everyday outfit in rural Indiana, like... at best it's just to entertain yourself. If you're actually desperately trying to find other gay kinksters like that it's just pathetic. If you just want to identify other gay people in passing in Wal-Mart of the next town over that's what enamel pins and buttons are for. BUT ANYWAY, a bunch of people started this by laughing about it - again, as I said, I'm assuming charitably that they were joking - but then a bunch more people followed this up by taking it seriously(ish) and there's like at least three or four pieces of fic based on this premise. These are just a tiny blip in the stream of fic for this pairing though. I haven't seen enough of this season over Wax's shoulder to really grasp why, but apparently people are feeling it.

And I had just finished a book that I really liked (Lolly Willowes) and been disappointed by the next two books I tried... so I followed a random link from someone's Tumblr post to a fic (Eddie/Steve) that touched on the bandana concept and then clicked the tag and I was like there's THAT much of this? So I've been idly reading through this largely unknown and bemusing pairing the past few days. My vibe with this pairing is like the pairing is a canal, and I'm lounging in a rowboat with a parasol, munching on fresh fruit and trailing the fingers of my hand in the water. I'm trailing my fingers through this pairing with lazy interest. There are falling leaves and flowers, the occasional lost beach ball or empty coke bottle, nice glimpses of fish, friendly little breezes. Every now and then I think I see an alligator and pull my hand back (this is a canal in the Everglades, the only kind of canal I have ever boated on). I expected more errors about the 80s to come up than I've seen so far, actually. I've seen hairspray, cars, and electric lighting in Victorian Sherlock Holmes fic, but in several days of browsing I haven't seen a single cell phone. I don't think knowledge of VHS, as surprising as it is, indicates they're in my age cohort though, because overall it just doesn't feel quite convincing - especially the pot-dealing metalhead who lives in a trailer park. To be fair to them, canon did this too, but just... he's too clean. And he doesn't seem to have enough Depression? (I won't blame that part on canon.) I knew... several of this guy and I was friends with them in middle school and the bullying and depression got worse and worse. One of them tried to kill himself. Another one eventually became an EMT, but yeah, I don't think there's enough bitterness in the fic, possibly because this type of social outcast isn't as outcast now or... something.

I've gone through AO3's whole store of this fandom now, not reading everything, but reading every header at least. I've also definitely established that some of the stories I remember are not online anymore, which is a shame - there seem to be quite a few authors who haven't transferred all their old writing, and only have more recent fandoms on AO3. I can sympathize. Actually I never put my popslash on AO3 for presumably the same reason, and I definitely have had my moments of doubt with other, more popular early works. Anyway, I may not be able to find much more Highlander to read (or rec) now, but I've been thinking I should perhaps try to collect examples which feel specifically the opposite of old school: like definitely contemporary, or modern, or recent, in their style. That might not be so easy though, since it would require rereading large bodies of things that I've already read fairly recently (not something I normally do).

Anyway, here are 10 more examples and my observations about them and what aspect of old slash style they seem to reflect. Background: Old Slash Scrapbook: 25 snippets from Highlander fic that are emblematic of the Old Slash aesthetic (from a couple weeks ago) and Rereading Highlander in the modern world from May 10th (contains a longer discussion of the idea of slash style in the comments).

( Read more... )

I found a fandom to reread: Highlander! I think this is working for me well partly because the last time I reread this fandom in any big way was years ago, but also because it's been quite a while since I reread any fandom this old.

(Definitely more Old Fandom than Due South, which to me marks a watershed point in the evolution into more modern media fandom. Highlander is in the same era/category as The Sentinel, I'd say. Smallville and SG1 overlap with Due South but for the most part feel less modern to me. There's a whole world of older fandoms too, of course. Star Trek springs to mind, but the online availability of the old stuff is pretty low. The Professionals is probably the most widely-available example, because they had that whole archive meticulously transcribed from old print zines, and now that's at AO3.)

When I looked at my bookmarks on AO3, there were only 4 in Highlander. In the past I've had tons more than this, bookmarks originally from the pre-archive era sites that I moved first to Delicious, then to AO3. I didn't realize so many had been lost in there - but a lot more old fic has made it to AO3 in recent years, so I'm looking for half-remembered fic now.

But I have found myself reading half or two thirds of something and then failing out (usually because the idea of a 400-year-old man dealing with m/m sex or sexual thoughts for the first time keeps reducing me to giggles and breaking the mood), when I know that I read it all the way through in 2004 and probably somewhere around 2009 (I didn't find that PLAUSIBLE in my 20s; I just enjoyed reading it to the end anyway).

The other thing that keeps distracting me, although not preventing me from reading, is remembering that Peter Wingfield retired from acting and is now an anesthesiologist. This fandom didn't really need any more sources of chuckles, but there it is.

I've been seeing the backlash over the British royals' visit to Jamaica (I've been seeing Twitter and Tumblr threads, but here's a Guardian article) and this reminds me of some other stuff I saw on Twitter recently: there was some kind of controversy (?) in Britain about something Prince William and some friend said/did recently and then there was some kind of explainer thread referring to 'rumors' and 'secret royal sources' etc to summarize that this other wealthy couple were Kate and William's best friends and neighbors at their rural primary residence but it apparently turned out that William was having an affair with the woman and Kate was demanding complete separation from the couple (understandably) and it was all extremely sordid and soap opera. This current story, which I think could be summarized in progressive Twitter opinion as "Why Did They Think This Was a Good Look?!", isn't even the first recent example of revelations of complete Yikes about Prince William, though, even aside from the whole racism!! thing connected to the schism with Harry and Meghan.

But anyway, my point is that from where I'm sitting, it seems like my generation of the North American Anglophone world has undergone a comically extreme evolution on the subject of Prince William.

The first time I remember being aware of the existence of William and Harry was when I was in middle school, 14-15ish?, and he was a reasonably popular celebrity Hot Guy to the middle class and nerdy American white girls of my acquaintance. There were posters of William (less frequently Harry) and pictures occasionally alongside boyband-type pinups and there were occasional conversations amounting to everyone agreeing on him being hotter than Harry. When I was in high school and later, the modern versions of romance-with-a-prince fiction started to be based on him; there were definitely some YA romances that were just rpf with self-insert ocs with the names changed. And as I moved through my 20s, the Romance With Royal Prince AU became increasingly popular as a type of fanfiction. Of course, because it's slash, these dealt with the idea of a royal coming out as gay as a major plotpoint, but most of the time the stories and plots were still clearly an evolution of the self-insert-with-prince-William idea, with a trope-laden, recognizably Romance Genre Heroine viewpoint character who was usually reasonably transparent.

But NOW this cultural narrative template has transformed into the middle class girl-next-door stuck in a permanent straightjacket of Jackie O-pastels and perfectly coiffed unthreatening feminine hair and makeup with a not-so-dreamy-anymore spineless git who is secretly mean to her and deliberately had an affair with her best friend, and BOTH of them are racist enough to cut off his brother over it?!

The positive PR that the royals (and unfortunately the concept of monarchy) received from the photogenicness of young Harry and William has sure gone places. Since I find celebrity gossip annoying on the whole and am philosophically opposed to monarchies in principle, my observation of these trends was usually tinged with impatience, but I have to admit that in recent years the turn towards anti-monarchism has livened it up. I do enjoy seeing that with mild glee, although not enough to seek out more of it than inevitably crosses my path anyway.

Obviously breakup fic is never going to reach huge status in slash fanfiction because romance drives the fannishness of the relationships, but it is really funny to think about the wavy fanfic mirrors of Prince William also turning out to be a combination of cruel and pathetic, cheating on the fairytale gay princess characters while suddenly looking haplessly terrible in every possible PR framing.

After I ran out of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books I went back to my current favorite series, Catriona McPherson's Dandy Gilver mysteries. I had actually waited long enough between that there were TWO new Dandy Gilver books. The sleuth is a member of the Scottish landed gentry in the 1920s (first book) - 30s (she's up to 1937 now), and they combine several of my favorite things in this way. First was The Turning Tide, a rather quirky visit to southern Scotland and a case involving a river ferrywoman going mad and then being murdered and a Roman archaeology intrigue. But the latest book, The Mirror Dance, was fantastic! It starts with the murder of a Punch and Judy puppeteer (or Punchinello man) during the puppet show in a public park while Dandy is in the audience with her lady's maid, cook, and parlor maid - a bit of a locked-room puzzle because he's murdered in a tiny tent with nowhere to hide and no escape routes. And he's been murdered on the 50-year anniversary of the murder of ANOTHER Punch and Judy puppeteer who had the same first and last name as him BUT IS NO RELATION. Absolutely delightful! Also I've tried to Google about the Commedia dell'arte roots of Punch and Judy before: it's an evolution from the stock characters of Commedia. Punch is Punchinello, and this book told me for the first time that the 'traditional' or old-style Punch and Judy shows also included Scaramouche, another of the well-known stock characters from Commedia! I guess I need to find an actual book about it to read. I've been meaning to find translations of some early modern Commedia plays to read as well, but I sort of fell out of Harlequin and Pierrot fandom before I unearthed any (I had started looking a few years ago). As always, the whole Dandy Gilver series is most highly recommended. The first one is called After the Armistice Ball.

I wanted to read some more sff after that. I tried the free sample of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie for a second time. I can't actually remember why I put it down the first time I started, but I bounced off it again. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Then I read the much-recommended The Tea Master and The Detective by Aliette de Bodard, which is, as everybody says, a clear tribute to Sherlock Holmes, but in a pan-Asian space opera setting predicated on a technology similar to the brainships of Anne McCaffrey's Ship Who Sang verse. And more importantly, with female characters: all the important characters. I did find it good reading, but I had some reservations about the narrator and the relationship between the Watson and Holmes figures (I won't say these reservations are fair, because, obviously, this isn't even a fanfic or a reboot, it's a transformative take in conversation with Holmes! But that said, I'm not exactly satisfied with the potential WHY for the specific changes that make the Watson character a lot more adversarial and hesitant to trust and build very little rapport with the Holmes figure for the bulk of the story. They look suspiciously like some of the changes you see simply in bad Holmes fanworks.) It seems this book was not the start of a series about these characters, but a side novella in a larger universe that is mostly about other characters.

I've been ambivalent about the Murderbot series by Martha Wells simply because it's so popular, and I tend to be suspicious of standout popularity. I usually don't find the things that come to my attention that way to my taste. But I read the first, All Systems Red, and enjoyed it a lot. I can also understand the runaway popularity better now. They aren't 100% unique and separate from genre history, but they do have a rather fresh angle to them. The point of view is unusually tight, and the narrator's pecularities (as a Murderbot!) make sense and are also charming. The plots of the first two books, at least, are well-judged to be a bit more bite-sized than the expected weighty sf tome - they're novels, but they're on the short side, and they're focused and well-constructed within the boundaries of their size. A bit like a nice 90-minute episode of a prestige tv miniseries with a self-contained episodic plot. Then there's the murderbot's positioning itself explicitly outside humanity and its exasperated fondness for humanity, which to me, at least, is both funny and cute - I can't help thinking it's like a herding dog, if herding dogs had that intelligence. Anyway, I also read the second one, Artificial Condition, and it was really good too. I'm not going to read them all in one gulp, because I want a bit more time to digest things as I go. I do still intend to read the rest.

Then I started to feel like I really wanted to read some high fantasy, and what I wound up with was Naomi Novik's Uprooted, which I hadn't got around to yet. It was about exactly as good and enjoyable as expected. I kept thinking, as I was reading, that it's funny and kind of charming how strong her authorial voice is. Her writing is just so... HER. It's recognizable in pretty much everything she writes, this book a bit more so than the Temeraire series, which I think is because the Temeraire series imposes a sort of Patrick O'Brien pastiche constraint on her natural style. She does retain some of those 19th-century quirks in her non-Temeraire stuff of course, particularly the old-fashioned sentence-joining with a colon, and those features were more noticeable here. As the story went along I saw reflections of Beauty and the Beast (of course), Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones), the Enchanted Forest a little bit, particularly a faint reflection of Morwen and Telemain towards the end (Patricia C. Wrede), maybe a sort of Robin McKinleyness about the scenes in the capital, Tolkien Ents, GRRM forest people (or whatever he calls them), and then... maybe a faint feel of Robin McKinley themes and ideas in the whole final part of the story, really.

Then I grabbed the ebook of Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, which won a Nebula or a Hugo in 1997 and was one of my favorite fantasy novels in high school. I actually presented a book report about it in history class senior year (that'd be 2001). I had forgotten most of the details of the plot, and looked them up on Wikipedia yesterday when I saw Hello Tailor (Daily Dot media critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw) tweeting about the movie they've just released that was based on it. Apparently the movie had a bizarrely huge budget, but looks pretty bad. Also it's just being released now when it was filmed in 2014? I guess it's gonna be a clusterfuck there, and the movie still cover pasted on the ebook just confirms that, looking like a flashback scene from Disney's Once Upon a Time, with prom hair and makeup along with... not really a very Versailles court gown exactly, but better than the hair and makeup. So I guess I'll reread that next.

I also REALLY enjoyed this series of essays about the (non)historicity of Game of Thrones yesterday:
Collections: That Dothraki Horde (4-part series) on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. A representative sample:

But Martin has done more damage than simply watching The Mongols (1961) would today. He has taken those old, inaccurate, racially tinged stereotypes and repackaged them, with an extra dash of contemporary cynicism to lend them the feeling of ‘reality’ and then used his reputation as a writer of more historically grounded fantasy (a reputation, I think we may say at this point, which ought to be discarded; Martin is an engaging writer but a poor historian) to give those old stereotypes the air of ‘real history’ and how things ‘really were.’ And so, just as Westeros became the vision of the Middle Ages that inhabits the mind of so many people (including quite a few of my students), the Dothraki become the mental model for the Generic Nomad: brutal, sexually violent, uncreative, unartistic, uncivilized. [...] And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate spot blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.

It's funny consuming something and identifying bits that would be seized on if it had a fandom.

Well, let's be honest, if it had a media fandom, because book fandoms don't get big enough, really. (This applies to TV and movies too though, of course.)

'This would definitely be the 2 side guys pairing that would get more slash than a popular het ship... and this guy would be the favorite redeemed bad boy and people would slash him with the protagonist in spite of his canon partner... and this guy would be a meme.'

Envisioning the otp-breaking ships that I know would happen almost makes me glad there's no fandom. Not quite though. (I want the memes.)

Banichi's POV on the entire Foreigner series might be about as funny as All I Ever Needed.

It's possible nobody who understands both sides of this reference is around anymore. All I Ever Needed was Helen's hilarious remix of Nsyncgrrrl's unintentionally hilarious epic All I Ever Wanted, which was deep in a dramatic and emo teenaged point of view, and by using a different point of view, the remix highlighted just how funny the moody protagonists really were. This was the first remix I - or most(?) of then popslash fandom - were aware of (2001? 2002?), and predates the term "remix" gaining popularity, at least in my corner of fandom.

I went to check my recall of events just now at fanlore only to discover that there's not even a page for AIEW, let alone any mention of the to-my-mind seminal AIEN.

I did sorta wake Wax up to ask about it (except not the bit about why it was funny - she does need her sleep), and she agreed. So once she reads the Foreigner series that will be at least two. I suppose nobody who was active in popslash then has worked on that section of the wiki.